Stories and thoughts on creating, evolving, and offering a great total customer experience

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What is Total CX?

Nothing is more fun than swapping horror stories about bad (or good, or weird) customer experiences you’ve had. And TotalCX is a place where you can do just that. However, it isn’t just a place for stories—it’s also a place to figure out how the customer experience should have been…what exactly went wrong…how to best improve it…and what lessons can we learn from it.

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Business Strategies

05/30/2014

We, and our clients, typically use Customer Scenario Mapping (and Customer Journey Mapping) as a technique to design improved customer experiences and to invent new products and services based on the “jobs” that customers need to do. However, it’s also a great sales tool. When a group of sales people and marketers are involved in identifying and streamlining Customers’ Scenarios, they build a deeper understanding of the customers’ contexts, desired outcomes, moments of truth, and conditions of satisfaction. Armed with this information, they can proactively counter objections and seem almost miraculously in touch with the customer’s unvoiced concerns.

Ronni Marshak, one of the co-designers of our Customer Scenario Mapping approach, found herself evaluating the sales techniques of a Citizens Bank assistant branch manager. She was impressed that, through careful listening—which all good salespeople do—he was able to discern most of her moments of truth and provide acceptable mitigations for them. But where he fell short was being able to come up with an offer that would actually meet her desired outcome and conditions of satisfaction. We recommend that sales people be trained in how to identify all the elements in customers’ critical scenarios.

Getting the Desired Outcome RightCitizens Bank Did a Good Job Selling a Prospect, but Couldn’t Meet the Ultimate Goal By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP and Senior Consultant, May 29, 2014

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05/05/2014

With the $20 price increase that Amazon recently made on Amazon Prime membership (from $79 to $99 per year), the company needs to justify the increase by offering more member benefits. Amazon has been touting the free monthly streaming videos and other Prime features.

In addition, on April 24, 2014, Amazon introduced Prime Pantry, a service available to Amazon Prime members only, which is seemingly based on the U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes, where you pay one rate no matter the weight or where the package is going.

The Prime Pantry website states, “Adding your first Prime Pantry item to Cart starts a Prime Pantry box. As you shop, you see that each Pantry item tells you what percentage of a Pantry box it fills based on its size and weight. Pantry boxes are large and can hold up to 45 pounds or four cubic feet of household products. As you check items off your list, we continuously track and show you how full your box is. You can buy as much or as little as you want for a flat $5.99 delivery fee per Prime Pantry box.”

Items available from the Pantry system include beverages, specific food and snacks, standard cooking supplies, personal care items, cleaning items, and pet food.

Note that the per-box fee is additional beyond the yearly $99 membership fee. Thus this “benefit” is also a revenue generator for Amazon.

10/07/2013

In last week’s article, I spent time exploring mobile crowdsourcing applications. Looking at apps such as Waze, where drivers report traffic-related incidents to enhance the GPS experience, and Minutely, where individuals provide up-to-the-minute updates on the weather report, I realized how effective crowdsourcing can be in improving our real-time experiences. But just as valuable, albeit in different ways, is the ability to get input from the crowd to create a set of information that can be aggregated over time, categorized, and made easy to access to help individuals make decisions, for example, how the customer reviews provided in TripAdvisor offers guidance on what airline to take, what location to visit, and where to stay. Similarly, crowd-provided suggestions are instrumental in fueling innovations within organizations, supported by mobile apps such as 7-Eleven’s Idea Hub.

As I brainstormed ideas for new crowdsourcing mobile apps, I proposed a kind of “citizen watch” app that allows individuals to report suspicious activity to the police or homeland security. As I stated, “Give me an app that lets citizens stop crime or even terrorism!”

This reminded me of Patty Seybold's Outside Innovation post of September 14th, “Crowd-Sourcing Safety in War Zones.” The post talked about applications used in Lebanon to help civilians stay out of danger: Ma2too3a maps crowdsourced info about protests, traffic, roadblocks, and clashed; and, in development, Way to Safety is being designed to allow individuals to record gunfire and send it to a site, which will identify the weapon from a sound database and triangulate recordings to pinpoint the exact location and type of fighting.

Such uses extend the value of crowdsourcing beyond convenience or business innovation and demonstrates, as Patty puts it, “how powerful and useful our mobile phones have become as literal life-saving devices, and how awesome it is that crowdsourced information can be quickly harnessed and mobilized to help people help each other.”

09/14/2013

What’s our advice to savvy executives who are trying to grow and nurture a customer-centric organization? Collaborate with your customers through a Customer Co-Design approach.

Although there are many methods out there to support customer co-design, we advocate our tried-and-true methodology, Customer Scenario® Mapping. For over 20 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and their customers to design new products, websites, business models, mobile strategies, and, well, just about anything, by starting with scenarios—what the customer is trying to achieve—and mapping out the steps that the customer would ideally like to take to reach his goal. The methodology encourages customers and company stakeholders to work together on revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, ideas by envisioning the ideal situation, not the next progression of the current process/product/model/etc. And, as we always remind you—design from the customer’s point of view!

We’ve tested this method around the world. It has been used successfully in Brazil (with farmers), in New Zealand (with adult learners and sheep-shearers), in Uganda (with single moms, rural farmers, school children, and rural transformation specialists), in Germany (with pharmaceutical execs), in the UK and Netherlands (with high tech networking professionals and distributors), in China and New York (with global container shipping customers and customs brokers and shippers). We’ve also led co-design sessions using Customer Scenario Mapping in many different industries: financial services, healthcare, insurance, packaged goods, food preparation, hospitality, travel, retail, mining, energy, and others.

12/07/2012

Only a
few years into its existence, the entire online coupon business is
struggling. Over 800 daily deal companies closed their doors in the last
two years. I turned my focus this week to coming up with strategies and
enhancements to daily deal sites, and offers that might renew the
excitement consumers felt when these deals first started showing up.
Some of the main ideas include:

11/30/2012

What did
you do after stuffing your face with turkey and all the fixings? If
you’re like most of us in the U.S., you shopped! In-store, online, or
combining the two, alone, or with family members, the call of the sale
price lured us in as we fought our way out of our food comas and
football immersions.

Patty Seybold has identified a number of shopping trends surfaced by the sales statistics that have resulted from Black Friday thru Cyber Monday, including:

Social shopping with family members and friends.

Shared online shopping using tablets that get passed around to show each other things they’re interested in.

Earlier retail openings on Thanksgiving evening.

In-store
group shopping with someone as the smartphone guru, responsible for
price checking, while other family members use their phones for
logistics and coordination.

Solo Cyber Monday shopping focused on getting the best deals.

Online retailers offering waves of deals throughout the long weekend to encourage shoppers to visit their sites often.

So, did
you follow the trends? If you’re like me, you will be getting very
chummy with the UPS delivery person over the next few weeks as I revel
in my online shopping deals.

~ Ronni

Shopping Smarter with Mobile Devices Changes the Face of Holiday ShoppingMobile Makes Its Mark on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Sales in 2012By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 29, 2012
How does consumers’ use of mobile devices change the way they shop?
The detailed shopping statistics from the five-day kick-off of the 2012
holiday shopping season gives us some clues. “Couch Commerce” was
popular on Thanksgiving, as friends and family passed computer tablets
around. Price comparisons on mobile apps helped in-store shoppers find
the best deals. On Cyber Monday, power shoppers used laptops and tablets
more than phones to grab deals.

08/17/2012

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

08/13/2012

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

07/19/2012

Last week, Ronni Marshak’s attention was drawn to a useful post in Customer Think, entitled, "B2B versus B2C - Debunking Five Customer Experience Myths" Since Ronni spends a lot of her working day helping businesses understand the customer experience needs of both business and consumer customers, she resonated with the points that author/consultant Tim Carrigan was making. So, in this article in our “How to Think About CX” series, Ronni expands on the five customer experience myths that Tim raises.

Consumers and Business Customers Are the Same People! People are people. When they want to get something done or fixed, or to understand how something works, they rely on the same modus operandi as business customers that they rely on as consumers. If they are the kinds of people who like to talk things through with an understanding person, they’ll reach for the phone first. If they’re the kind of person who prefers to self-serve and who regards direct contact as a last resort, they’ll rely on your web site, on content you provide, and on useful forum posts. They may even reach out via Twitter.

Customer Experience Strategies Should Be Designed for People; Not Companies If you’re in charge of marketing or customer experience or sales for a company that sells only to businesses, you may be relying too much on your direct sales force and/or your channel partners to meet your customers’ needs. Remember that the customer experience that’s associated with your brand and with your products surrounds those products. It extends far beyond the products themselves and it doesn’t have a lot to do with how good your salespeople are.

06/11/2012

We define personalization as the delivery of the most relevant and engaging content (such as products, images, or articles) for the visitor’s current task. There are different approaches to adapting customer interactions to the audience, including targeting, tailoring, customizing, segmenting, and personalizing. Personalization is the only approach that requires identifying and responding to a person. This identification might be anonymous or by name and might be performed via cookie or by log in.

Which Customer Scenarios? In order to personalize your customer experience, you need to consider the most important customer experiences your business supports. We find it useful to think in terms of specific customer scenarios. A customer scenario comprises a customer, a customer goal, and the ideal path to achieving that goal. For example, a new mother wants to feel confident that her child will get the education he deserves. She wants to quell her anxiety about the child’s future. From the business’s point of view, this is a person who should sign up for an education savings and investment product. Mother and business have congruent but different goals. Understanding the parent’s situation and perceptions will enable the business to be more successful in both marketing to her and serving her.

Do You Have the Data You Need? Do you have access to the data required to support the personalization you want? Data supporting personalization is wide ranging and frequently big. It includes environment data, such as time zone, device, country, and browser type; site behavior data, such as past visit patterns, purchases, and campaign exposure; referrer data such as domain, campaign, social graph, and affiliate; transitory data such as time, weekday, and recency of visits; and data from other sites and systems, such as call center and third-party data.

How much will it cost to get and use the data? How difficult will it be to be granted access to the data? What customer data will be useful, and where is it? What product data will be needed? What information about content will be useful, and, if we don’t have that information, how will we create it? Data accessibility will determine what personalization approaches are possible. The value of achieving various personalization features will determine how much the data is worth to your business and encourage initiatives to acquire and improve data.